Readability: Why are long words in the website boilerplate highlighted on the page report?

When Siteimprove identifies content on a page, the content is extracted and the boiler plate (i.e. always-existing elements on a page such as menus, banners, headers, footers and columns) are excluded.

However, you may have noticed long/polysyllabic words highlighted on the page report within areas that would technically be called boilerplate.

If Siteimprove's readability algorithm has identified a long/polysyllabic word in the content of your page, the page report will highlight all instances found on the page, including sections that are not seen as content.

This is done to assist in improving the general readability of your web pages. If there is a word that you consider changing, it is useful to get a reference to other occurrences of that word on the page.

You can scroll through the number of instances of a word using the arrow keys on the right-hand side of the page report.

You can also utilize the Word List within Quality Assurance by searching for the long word that was highlighted in the page report.

This will show you on what other pages on your website the word was also found. You can also create a policy within the Policy service that will match the specific word.